Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The next journey brought us to the outskirts of La Banda, a town of considerable import-
ance near Santiago, the capital of the province. When we arrived at a nice
finca
(farm) I
entered to ask if we might spend the night there. The owner, an elderly gentleman, received
me with warm words of welcome and assured me that he would never allow me to proceed
before I had spent a whole week with him. Nothing was left undone to make me comfortable,
and the horses, having been bathed, were turned loose in a beautiful alfalfa field. After they
hadrolled andshakenthemselves theysettled downtomake upforwhattheyhadmissed dur-
ingtheprevioustendaysorso,andsoontheyweremunchingthejuicymouthfulsofgrass,the
noise of mastication sounding like sweet music to me.
I stayed a whole week with my kind host, and besides other entertainments I was taken to
a travelling circus one night. The circus show was much the same as anywhere else: a couple
of acrobats, a horribly painted, high-kicking señorita of at least forty winters, a few trained
dogs and horses went through a lot of useless figures whilst H.M. the manager, dressed in
greasytailcoatswitharubbershirtfrontandcollar,crackedthewhipandtwitchedhisplastered
'Kaiser Bill' moustache.
Once the circus part was over, a stage was arranged and all the artistes (?) dressed to
present the eagerly-waiting public with a drama. All such circus dramas in the Argentine are
supposed to take one back to the old gaucho times, but I doubt if ever so much blood ran in
all the dramas of real life as is supposed to run in one of these plays alone. One great and very
interestingdifferenceexistsbetweenoneoftheseArgentinecircusdramasandwhatiscalleda
'drama' in the moving pictures. The movie hero invariably comes out top dog and fades away
from the sighing public of sentimental ladies with one of those long-drawn kisses that make
the young ladies shiver. Now the final scene of an Argentine circus drama is utterly different,
for here the hero must be killed on a stage strewn with dead or dying friends and enemies,
some having been stabbed, others shot, clubbed or strangled in a regular hurricane free-for-all
fight; in other words, these circus dramas have ultra-dramatic final scenes, so dramatic in fact
that they are first-class comedies.
Likeallgoodthings,mystayherehadtocometoanend,anditwaswithregretthatIparted
frommykindhostandhisfamily.Heaccompanied meforsomedistance, ridingononeofthe
small but hardy ponies of the region, and as he turned after the final farewell I noticed that his
eyeswerewet.Thisgentleman belongedtotheoldArgentinetype;peoplewhosereligionwas
hospitality and whose friendship was a guarantee at any time.
After two long journeys we arrived in Tucuman, a pretty town at the foot of the first range
of the Andes. The country round this town is beautiful and exceedingly fertile, and the sugar
industryisthechiefsourceofwealth.Tucumanisoftencalledthe'Eden'oftheArgentine,and
here federal state was declared in the year 1816. The small, old-fashioned house in which the
document was signed still stands and is now protected by a glass building enclosing it. I was
invited to stay at the military barracks, where both the horses and myself were shown every
consideration. Military service in the Argentine is compulsory, one year in the army or two in
